Reposted here from another thread just to keep it all in one place. The other thread was about lisitng sites in general and can be found here:
viewtopic.php?t=23090
russellt wrote:New member, so be gentle pls.
Have any of you signed up for Cottage Cooperative, and if so what has your experience been?
I signed up for a 5 site package about 10 months ago and joined their Twitter feed. So am coming up for renewal, and am really unsure about it. I originally signed-up because I thought the concept was really powerful, and I told the owners that I was excited to be part of this new concept. I genuinely believe it has real potential.
However, it really hasn’t lived up to expectations in this first year. My 5 sites have had about 1000 hits in 10 months = average 20 hits per site per month and, as far as I can tell, none of my enquiries/bookings last year referred to CC as the original source. This is not a great performance, in my book.
Leaving aside the enquiry-generating performance of CC, as it is their first year, am I missing the point or am I not properly hooked in to the ‘cooperative’ aspect of the service? I emailed CC with a few simple ideas as to how they could make their websites more attractive/user-friendly for both owners and visitors, but really didn’t get much buy-in or even discussion/debate around the ideas.
So what is the ‘cooperative’ aspect of CC, beyond their Twitter feed? Have I missed something, or is it just another listings service?
Opinions please.
Riverside wrote:Hi, I hope I can answer a few of your questions (I'm one of the founding members of The Cottage Cooperative). Because we're not interested in taking a commission or an enquiry system, we're just about getting guests onto the owners websites we've had this question a few times with renewals (which are otherwise going well). Once the potential guest is on your website they don't always declare where they 'came from' if they book, which to be fair I'm not sure I always would remember if I was just searching around the internet and followed a link.
I also advertise on Owners Direct, my Cottage Cooperative listings generate the same kind of page views as OD does (a little more actually) which I'm really pleased with given how long we've been going. I track all the click throughs via google analytics and I am pleased with how they're performing for me personally. Performance aside, I'm concerned about your feeling on how we've answered your suggestions. We're all owners ourselves and we're more than happy to discuss potential improvements (in fact we actively encourage it, I'm determined to improve the sites as much as I can), perhaps you could drop me a direct message and we can continue the discussion there. Sometimes it does come down to available resources - there's a ton of things I would love to develop, but they're on a waiting list, as it were! In addition to our newsletters perhaps member engagement is an area we need to develop also.
The cooperative aspect of the service relates to our structure (set up with the help of Co-operatives UK - who we are a member of) and that membership funds are ploughed back into marketing and development as much as humanly possible after costs. We're really feeling this backlash of the bigger sites from an awful lot of members and it just motivates us more to really take them on.